


Carry That Weight

by merryhouse



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-23
Updated: 2013-02-27
Packaged: 2017-12-03 08:27:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/696297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merryhouse/pseuds/merryhouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jon doesn't die with his brother, though there are times when he thinks that such a fate would have been kinder. A triptych of life, death, and what comes after, though not necessarily in that order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1. Death

**Author's Note:**

> I was sad and thinking about The Twins, so I wrote about twins. Ah, the thought process of a painfully simple mind. Character tags are a lonely place at the moment since not everyone has yet decided to come to the party.

 

  
_"Kill the boy and let the man be born._ " Maester Aemon,  **A Dance With Dragons,** GRRM

* * *

They’re having a fag outside the pub, faces lit up in the dark night by the glow of streetlights and burning nicotine, watching the tail end of Edmure’s stag night group spill out onto the street.

“So s'your turn next, then, isn’t it?” Jon asks around his cigarette, turning to smirk at Robb as his brother looks over at the growing knot of people on the roadside, all raucous laughter and slurred songs. 

“Ah, not quite,” he laughs, shaking his head, “Don’t think I’m ready for a wedding yet, myself.”

“You want to talk to mum and dad about that? Mum seems to think you’re seconds away from eloping, I swear, and for some reason I’m the one copping it. S’always _‘your brother_ ’…”

Robb cocks his head, exhaling smoke through his nose.

“Well, if she squints at Edmure's wedding photos she can probably convince herself that it's me getting married. Reckon she’s just-" he pinches out his cigarette, "… _shit_ , what the hell’s going on over there?”

Jon follows his brother’s gaze to where another group of men- dark jacketed and heavy footed amidst Edmure’s sea of drunken and bedecked revellers- has insinuated themselves amidst the stag group, the tallest of them shoving Edmure to the ground by the shoulders. Their uncle looks ridiculous, gaping with glazed eyes up at the man, the plastic Tesco crown they’d set on his head earlier in the night falling down over his eyes.

“Bloody hell, of all things,” Jon says under his breath, and watches in horror as someone lands a punch on Harry Karstark’s jaw and he goes down, howling. It’s only seconds before other fists start flying, and Jon flicks aside his cigarette butt as he and Robb sprint to tear up the brawl, fists and elbows and curse words alike flying thick and fast.

It’s only when Jon has pulled one man off Theon by the scruff of his collar and tossed him unceremoniously to the ground that another one levels a punch at him and catches him on the ear, only to have Jon hook him behind the knee with a bent leg and send him sprawling. He turns just in time to see Robb step in between another man and Edmure, one arm behind him to push away their young uncle, bruised and with blood pouring from his nose. The other man is in a worn leather jacket, dark curls falling in his face, and Jon feels a hand grabbing at the hem of his shirt, turns and trips someone in a blue wind jacket. He turns back and Robb looks over his shoulder, starts to yell something at Jon as the leather jacket punches him in the stomach, and then there’s a flash of silver and Jon lunges too late.

* * *

Robb Stark dies with a knife to the heart, eyes open as he falls, hair flashing red and blue in the police lights.

* * *

Jon isn’t allowed out for the funeral, and so his last memory of his family is this: stony faced and solemn father, red-eyed and straight-backed mother, one little sister’s half-sobbed goodbye voicemail message. No younger Starks at the trial, all of them squirreled away at home, and Jon doesn’t want to think about how much they hate him, either because they believe he killed Robb, or because- truthfully- he let it happen.

Behind bars, he is quick to learn that sharing a surname with the man who put half the inmates in their cells is not something that should be publicised, and is even quicker to slip back into that sullen, dark place of monosyllabic words and thousand mile stares that he hasn’t visited since his early teenage years.

And so it is that Jon Stark, too, dies- only this brother does so in jail in a world where somewhere a man with the same curly hair and a similar leather jacket walks free at the testimony of one Theon Greyjoy. The prison they put him in is an old stronghold, one of the last remaining stone castles from the time of the wolves and the dragons and the lions. The stone walls are thick both in construction and history of things seen and heard, and the entire castle is surrounded by a circular wall of white-rendered concrete so tall that it blocks out even the treetops beyond it, affording the prisoners view of nothing but a bleak grey-white sky.

The food is too salty and the mattress too thin, but Jon notices none of this for all his grief, and the first month inside is little more than a hazy smear of grey and black and white. Living in a world without Robb (red, vibrant Robb) is drained of colour and imbalanced in much the same way that the world for Robb without Jon would be too bright and untempered by stoic greys and whites would surely be. _  
_

When he sleeps he dreams of his old life: of football with his mates and dates with Val and laughing at reality television with his siblings. In his dreams he builds entire cities, utopias of brightness and joy, and his parents can look him in the eye again. But most nights he spends awake in his tiny cell, eyes shut but mind running, unable to sleep for the unseasonable heat that courses through the prison and the ghosts that haunt his sleeping and waking lives both.

Summer lasts unbearably long, the months dragging their feet like a reluctant schoolboy, and Jon is unable to settle in the humidity of it all, falling victim to the heavy, drowsy claw of summer’s hands. He longs for winter and the familiar biting thrill of cold in his bones, but given the way that his life has fallen apart in his hands, he is unsurprised that even this wish should go ungranted.

* * *

At first he’s just “the bastard who killed his twin”, and Jon think there is some sort of dark, ironic amusement to be drawn from the fact that a group of convicted rapists and murderers deride him for purportedly killing his brother. He tries to slink by unnoticed, silent and detached, though the moral highground he tries to dig his feet into crumbles beneath him when his public schoolboy manners and steely brand of politeness betray him. The inmates all wear the same cloaks of disgrace and disillusionment upon their shoulders, angry and eager to draw blood, and take personal offense that one amidst their ranks should consider himself above such destructive behaviour. His silence unnerves them, and his blatant apathy towards their attempts at provocation makes them see red (something that Jon himself cannot yet see, but neither has he forgotten).

“Yeah, everyone’s innocent in here,” they say, once they’ve asked him how _exactly_ he’d offed his own twin, and he’s responded once more, in the flattest of voices, that he never did. He shakes his head and bites his tongue, resentment curling cold in his throat and freezing in his belly. They set upon him in the yard, once, with shovels and jumpsuits tied down at the waist, because Alliser Thorne- the warden in charge- is completely useless, and for a moment Jon’s mind flashes back to that horrible night that ended with him in handcuffs and his brother laying beneath a white sheet.

Then he remembers cadet training with Robb in their last years of secondary school, and before that martial arts lessons in the community centre gymnasium (and Arya, eleven years old and at her first Judo competition, green belt knotted tight around her waist). He looks around the circle of men, finds the ringleaders, and then springs. He economises his movements, aiming for efficiency and taking not even the most grim of pleasures from his task, and there is no rush of blood to the head, no shot of adrenalin coursing through his veins. There is nothing. 

He smashes Halder’s nose with the heel of his hand and kicks Toad in the stomach, then pushes past the other men and walks away. His hands shake as he settles on a bench on the opposite side of the yard, but he steels himself and looks over at them, waits until one of them makes eye contact.

That night in the dining hall, he picks through his food and listens to their whispers.

“Like _snow_ , that one,” Dareon hisses, “Moves soft and silent as it, and just as bloody cold. And won’t tell us his surname? Well, I’m callin’ him Jon Snow, now on, Jon Snow the silent bastard.”

It’s oddly poetic, from a convicted criminal, and the name sticks. Jon himself doesn’t mind it, because since all in sundry have made it clear that he is no longer welcome to the Stark name, he is in want of a new one. Snow suits him just fine.

* * *

The only person to visit him is Jeyne, well-read Jeyne with her carefully chosen words and slow smiles, whom Robb had always looked at like she’d hung the moon. It’s three weeks after the funeral and she looks a wreck: drawn and pallid, eyes dark from too little sleep and hands shaking with too much caffeine. Even so, she’s too pretty for a place like this, all concrete and steel and scratched mauve paint, and Jon hates himself for giving her reason to be there. She fumbles over her words in a way that is startling and unfamiliar, the syllables spilling out and tripping over one another in her mouth.

“I know that you didn’t do it,” she says through the plexiglass, and she’s the first person to look Jon in the eyes since his father, in that moment outside the court, “I know you wouldn’t- _Theon..._ I couldn't do any- I'm sorry we couldn't get you out for the- the...I...“

Jon watches her for a moment, as she tips her head back and stares at the ceiling, and when she looks back down her eyes are filled with tears.

“Thank you,” he says, gently, because there's nothing else to say, "I'm sorry."

Jeyne doesn't say anything for a while, rolls the bracelet on her left wrist between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand. When she does speak, her voice is steadier, eyes determined.

“We’ll get you out,” she says, “We’ll find the bastard who did this, and once we do, I swear it, we’ll throw Theon in here with him. I’m so sorry, Jon.”

From the way Robb spoke about her, Jeyne was not the kind to ever tell such grand lies, but still Jon can't find it in himself to put stock in such a promise.

She comes once a week, for a while, when she’s not busy with class or working or visiting her parents in their care home. Jon thinks about how Robb used to make the trip with her every Saturday, a one and a half hour drive one way, and he panics when he takes too long to remember his brother’s face (nearly the same, nearly the same as his: the same nose, the same curls, the same jaw. Different colours, though, one freckled and dimpled and light and the other dark and sharp and shadowed).

One Wednesday she comes in and tells him that she’s been offered a graduate fellowship in the US, and that she’s going to take it. Jon doesn’t begrudge her that, doesn’t resent her for moving on with her life, even though he does hate that he’s still stuck in jail, rotting.

She still sends him letters, occasionally, until one day they stop, and Jon understands, because Jeyne is twenty two and clever, and has better things to do than write letters to her dead boyfriend’s incarcerated brother.

* * *

What he doesn't understand, though, is why none of his family writes to him, not even Arya, and he doesn't know what to do with the bitterness trying to take root in his chest, so he throws himself into manual labour, plants trees and mops floors and relays bitumen. HIs hands crack and callous over, and at night he sleeps the silent, terror free sleep of the dead.

He gets good behaviour rewards and is allowed to request his work station, so he asks to go to the library. He finds paper and pens and he draws- buildings and cities and homes, tries to get down on paper things that he may never again see and as such is afraid to forget. He’s surrounded, on all sides, by the wall, and beyond that, god knows what, but he can imagine what might stand of the world he once knew, rebuild it with his own hands. He tries not to look out the window.

* * *

He’s been there for almost a year when there’s a new inmate, Sam Tarly, and Jon almost pities him. He’s just a kid, really, only newly turned nineteen, and he’s too shy and meek by half. Jon remembers his own first days behind bars, thinks about the time the other men saw his silence as weakness and intimidation, misread his aloofness for fear.

Sam is too slow in the yard when the other men come to push him around, and at first Jon pretends not to see them knocking him to the ground, just hunches lower over the book he is reading and lets the too-warm breeze lift his hair. He’s had enough of pulling apart fights for his lifetime, and while he knows that the other men won’t bother him anymore, he doesn’t exactly think Sam will be left alone for having another man have to step in and save him.

After a few days, though, guilt weighs heavy in Jon’s stomach as he sees Sam sit at lunch, eyes downcast and blackened, the shoulder seam of his tee shirt torn and his lip split. The next time Toad and his goons set upon him in the yard, Jon carefully dog-ears the corner of his page, crosses the yard, and gets Toad in the jaw with a right hook.

“You leave him alone, alright,” he says calmly as he looks down at Toad's prone form, “I know you lot get some sick satisfaction beating up a kid who’s smaller than you, but it’s embarrassing and you know it. You start it up with someone your size and we’ll see who’s so tough.”

He walks away, and doesn’t even deign to answer when one of the men calls after him (“Is that a _threat_ , Jon Snow?).

At dinner, Sam tentatively sets his tray across Jon, next to Grenn, and Pyp trails off mid sentence to look up.

“…alright?”

“Hi,” the kid says, nervously, “I just- just wanted to say- thankyou, Jon, for what you did for me in the yard.”

Jon looks at him.

“I didn’t do it for you,” he says bitterly, “I just don’t like seeing guys picking on others who’ve no way to fight back.”

“Oh,” Sam says, and he doesn’t seem to know what to say beyond that, so Grenn looks at Pyp who looks at Jon who shrugs, and just like that, Sam becomes part of their little group.

Nobody knows exactly what he is in for and he seems disinclined to tell them, though after a week Jon is able to recite- in order- all the instances in Sam’s childhood that contributed to the enormous cross he bears in the form of unresolved issues with his father.

* * *

The days tick on behind the wall, some faster than others, and flashes of Jon’s life from _before_ come with increasing rarity and significantly less detail. One day, though, he looks at the white wall that encloses all that is left of his world, and unbidden remembers being twelve years old and on a school trip, looking up at the remains of the once great wall that stood at Castle Black. He remembers the trip as the moment he decided he wanted to be an architect, because he’d heard the stories of how the wall had once been so _magical_ , and felt so awed and insignificant in its presence. He grabs for that same sense of wonder, now, but even that joy has turned sour in his mouth, and the only remaints left for him to gaze upon now are those of his own life. It is that realisation that somehow sparks a flicker of hope, and Jon doesn't turn away from the wall in disappointment, as he has done for so many months past.

Jon Stark may have died, but Jon Snow lives, and now he looks at the rubble and tries to assess how best to rebuild.  

 


	2. Life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading and reacting in the form of your choice to the previous chapter. Truly. Here we have some not exactly slight tweaking of two character's ages, but you know, modern AU so let's just go with it.

Eddard Stark, Director of Public Prosecutions, sends a line of Freys to jail on assorted charges of felony and misdemeanour, and with them their subordinates of petty thieves and paid knives. Boltons and Haighs and Erenfords alike, all of them young men trying to cast their lot into the fickle world of organised crime’s darkest circles.

Those on charges of murder, assault, rape, and armed burglary go to The Wall (nobody calls it by it’s real name, not anymore, not when  _The Wall_  is so much easier and closer to the truth), while their white collar counterparts are sent to the Dreadfort, and Ned tries to wipe them from his memory with the snapping shut of his briefcase and a stiff drink. In the days before they are sentenced, the men sit in their holding cells in King’s Landing, each of them fully aware of their own fate and cursing the Stark name.

“That fucking  _bastard_ ,” Roose Bolton says, resting his elbows on his spread knees, “Doesn’t he realise, he keeps pulling this shit: he’s making himself enemies, and people’ll come for his kids.”

He grins, cracks his bony knuckles.

“Do them in like I did to his boy Robbie. Pretty boys, him and the twin, the one who got locked up- bet there were girls crying everywhere for days when they found that one out.”

Emmon Frey eyes him boredly from where he is lying on his back across the cell, one arm bent at the elbow and tucked behind his head.

“How long d’you think before someone puts it together?”

“Eventually,” Roose shrugs, “Too late, though. We’re heading to The Wall in _days_ , and the leftover twin’s locked up there. We can fuck him around a bit, show his old man who’s  _really_  in control here.”

“Yeah, yeah, alright, but don’t you think Greyjoy’s going to run right back to Stark when he hears everyone who paid him off’s outta the way?”

“Not everyone,” Roose reminds him, “Ramsay? That bitch sister of yours? Walda?”

Emmon snorts, “Which one?”

“The fat one,” Roose says, “Look, there’s enough left outside to keep the boy in line- and it’s Theon  _Greyjoy_. Boy has daddy issues from here to Dorne, you tell me that he’s going to risk us squealing on Balon to get Eddard Stark Jr outta jail and I’ll call you a liar.”

“Eh, fair point,” Emmon says, “If he’s got half a brain he’ll just disappear. Heard the dead ginger’s girlfriend fucked right off after he died. Went to the US or something, left the brother in jail. How’re we going to find him in there, anyway? Heard this new place makes a big deal of not using surnames inside.”

Roose stares at him, scrunches his nose in disgust, “Don’t you know fucking anything? He looks almost exactly like me, that’s the whole  _point_.”

* * *

Jon is at The Wall for seventeen months when there’s a letter from Stannis Baratheon of all people, saying there’s new evidence and his trial has been reopened. Harry Karstark, one of the other men at Edmure’s stag party and someone who fought in the very brawl that started the whole mess, wishes to amend his testimony. Things happen fast, and Stannis sweeps into jail in a dark suit and flurry of papers to be read and signed.

The transcripts say that he is “certain,  _certain_  that Jon didn’t do it, wouldn’t do it- they were best mates for Christ’s sakes, he wouldn’t’ve, he wouldn’tve…” and Jon reads them with little emotion. Theon Greyjoy is missing, apparently, his flat found empty and his job abandoned without two week’s notice, and since he was the primary witness during Jon’s trial, Jon is to walk free. He doesn’t understand the technicalities of it, not beyond what Stannis explains when he comes to meet him during visiting hours, and he’s sure it’s not meant to be quite so simple.

“We have reason to believe that it may have been a case of mistaken identity,” Stannis says curtly, “And coupled with Greyjoy’s disappearance in time with most of the Bolton’s incarceration- much doubt has been cast upon his initial testimony, which has since been redacted. There is evidence to suggest that he was being paid off by a member of the Bolton ring in exchange for the continued secrecy of his father’s whereabouts. As you may well know, much of the Greyjoy family are entrenched in the same gang warfare as the Boltons, and have evaded capture for years.”

Jon leans back in his seat, unspeaking, and almost pities Theon for all the times he tried so hard to prove himself a different man to his father, only to ultimately find himself tangled in their net.

“So what does this mean for me?” he asks, finally, and Stannis clears his throat.

“Well. Your father thought it improper that he handle your case, considering his close ties-“

Jon snorts.

“His  _close ties_ to the accused,” Stannis says again, “Yet has prevailed upon the King’s council to grant you acquittal. Harry Karstark’s amended testimony and Greyjoy’s disappearance have made this possible, so you shall be released within the next twenty four hours.”

“What?” Jon shakes his head, “Just like that…”

Stannis regards him uncomfortably.

“Yes. Your father wanted to know- he intends to be the one to pick you up, tomorrow.”

Jon’s gaze sharpens and he raises his eyebrows, “I don’t want to see him.”

When Stannis says nothing, he elaborates, “I’m grateful for what he’s done with- with this, but I don’t want to see him. Not after- no. Nobody wanted to see me here, so it’s only fair that I can make that choice.”

Something in him tightens as he says the words, but he sets his jaw and refuses to break Stannis’ gaze.

“Your father was adamant that you did not do it,” Stannis says tightly, “Both your parents, in fact. They did not think you guilty, and it was they who pressed for the reopening of your trial, and who kept the worst of it out of the papers.”

“ _Seventeen months_ and none of them visited me. No visits, no letters, _nothing_. They left me here to rot,” Jon says coldly, “Whether or not they thought I was guilty, they treated me like I was, and they  _left me here_.”

“They were grieving, Jon,” Stannis says in obvious discomfort, “As they still are, to be sure. And they want to put things to right-”

“Bit late for that now,” Jon says angrily, “And grieving? What about me? He was  _my brother_  and everybody thought I killed him, and my parents just  _let_  them think that, how do you think  _I_ feel?”

Stannis says nothing, so Jon stands, his chair scraping roughly against the concrete.

“Thanks for your help, but if you’d just send a cab tomorrow, that’ll be enough.”

* * *

He transfers university campus, moves back up north and refuses to look back, though even in the normally wet country he still finds himself irritated by the warm winds that stir the browned leaves in the gutters. In a fit of defiance he introduces himself as Jon Snow when people ask, though student loans won’t let him drop the “Stark” on his paperwork, and he makes a new email account and deactivates his Facebook, desperate to sever all ties to the life he had before.

He walks the long way to campus everyday to avoid the pet shop with the baby huskies in the window, because he looks at them and sees the photo he used to have taped to the wall above his computer: him and Robb at their sixth birthday party, curly haired and wearing twin smiles with their arms looped around the necks of their new puppies.

It’s weeks before he starts to draw again, and even then his tutors frown at his sketches, his professors seemingly confounded by the fact that every program he draws is fortified and archaic, set in stone and iron against his classmate’s glass and steel projects. He tries his hand at portraiture, even though that never was his area, and fills sheets upon sheets with faces that visit him only in dreams.

He drinks too much coffee, and misses his brother like a sawn off limb. He remembers reading, once, about twins- a man and a woman- who pitched themselves off London Bridge when the man (James? Jack? Jamie?) was diagnosed with cancer, neither of them able to survive the thought of a world without the other. He doesn’t understand it, exactly, would never take himself to that extreme- but he feels a shadow of that despair nonetheless. Many times he quirks as a smile at something and goes to text it to Robb, only when he gets to his phone there’s no contact listed under the name and no Robb Stark anywhere that matters.

* * *

They send him to a counsellor, as part of the court’s attempt to reassimilate him into society, and he drags his feet to every session. Jon hates everything about her from her red-tipped fingers to her stupid, pretentious name. He doesn’t think people named their children  _Melisandre_  outside of fantasy novels, and neither the gold nameplate that sits on her desk nor her framed university diploma on the wall stop him from thinking that it is an assumed name. 

The patient in the timeslot before him (twenty minutes to seven  _sharp_ every Wednesday evening, thank you very much) is a middle aged man with lank hair in a heavy coat in spite of the weather, and with pockets full of god-knows-what. Every time Jon passes him in the doorway to Melisandre’s office he hears the rattling of the man’s pockets, cringes away from his sneer, and the interaction does nothing to assuage Jon’s suspicion that he is being sent to counselling because Stannis Baratheon thinks something drove him a bit mad in prison.

“You are late, Jon Snow,” Melisandre says in that laconic voice of hers when Jon arrives at a quarter to seven one week, dripping rainwater onto her carpet.

“I’m sorry,” Jon says sullenly, shuffling awkwardly in the doorway, “The weather, you know…”

Melisandre watches him over joined fingertips for a moment before she purses her lips.

“Come in, there’s no sense wasting what’s left of your hour.”

She indicates the chaise long by the fire that is inexplicably always burning in the hearth, and Jon cringes as his wet shoes squelch along the carpet.

“Sorry,” he mumbles when he finally crosses the room and Melisandre has snapped the door shut, perched herself on the red wingback by the window.

“You are not in control of the weather, Jon,” she says serenely, once Jon has settled in his seat, “Or is there something you’re not telling me?”

She smiles, and it is tight on her pale face, and not for the first time Jon wonders at her apparent friendship with Stannis: he can’t imagine where on earth they would have met, let alone what they might have in common.

“I don’t feel I’m in control of anything, really,” he says in response, and tilts his chin up when she scrutinises him.

“How has this week been?”

“Up and down. Some days better than others. I’m alright when I’m busy, when I forget- everything seems to remind me…now.”

Across him, Melisandre crosses her legs, watches him with an inscrutable expression.

“There comes a time in a man’s life where he must make a choice- a choice between making things happen and letting them happen to him. I think, Jon, that you are at this stage now. You must make the choice, for example- are you Jon Snow or Jon Stark?”

“It’s not as easy as that,” Jon snaps, and then immediately relents, embarrassed, “It’s not easy.”

He slumps further into his seat, and Melisandre tilts her head.

“Do you still want to keep hiding from your family?”

“I’m not-“ Jon starts and stops, silenced by Melisandre’s raised eyebrow, “Yes. No. I…”

He leans forward, head falling into his hands, and flicks his eyes up to look at Melisandre through his hair.

“Part of it is my fault, now, and I just don’t know how to fix it. I made my bed, so now I must-“

“Lie in it?” Melisandre finishes and Jon nods, wordless.

“Your brother died. You were wrongly accused of the crime, convicted, and spent almost two years in the company of some of the nation’s most callous criminals. Following your emancipation, you moved to a new city where you knew no one, secured yourself a job, found a flat, and- by all accounts- are coping as well as could be expected, all while studying full time at university. Do you know what that tells me about you?”

Jon looks up at her.

“Who tells you that I’m coping well?” he asks disbelievingly, and she pointedly ignores him.

“Life is a series of days, some of them better than others, and man is defined neither by the hardships he faces nor the dark times he must endure, but the way that he emerges from darkness and finds himself once more in the light.  _You_ , Jon Snow, are a man who  _makes_  things happen, and I have every faith that you will come into the light sometime soon.”

It’s a moment before Jon looks up, her words humming in his head, and when he does, a log in the fireplace hisses and for just a moment the room is bathed in red.

* * *

Things don’t magically change overnight, and he still checks his email every morning before he gets up, lying in bed with his phone at arm’s length and hoping someone will find him. But he tacks the photo of six year old him and Robb up above his desk, goes rock climbing at the community centre and thinks of Bran, and leaves the television on  _Masterchef_  while he’s studying at the table, wondering if it’s still Sansa’s favourite show. A little red-haired boy clutches his mother’s hand as he walks down high street, and Jon’s stomach clutches in involuntary memory of Rickon and his  _own_  mother. Every morning he looks in the mirror and sees his father, traces of his little sister, and it still aches, though doesn’t smart so much as it once did.

He walks around- when he’s not busy with work or classes or the handful of friends he has made- stops to scratch drawings of buildings into his sketchbook, stands in the shadows of skyscrapers and looks up, up, up, up, up.

* * *

He goes to class, tacks more photos up on his bedroom wall, and one day, he meets a girl.

He’s signed up for an interfaculty design competition, the kind with a ridiculous brief and even more ridiculous working period, and the engineering student he gets partnered with is just his type: clever and sarcastic and quick as a whip, and she takes a red pen to his sketches after a few moments of contemplation. Her name is Ygritte, and Jon thinks that to call her pretty would not be right, because while she certainly is that and more, the word implies delicacy and passivity, meekness, and she is none of these things.

“Your drawings are beautiful,” she says, “But when it comes to  _engineering_ \- you know absolutely nothing, I can tell. That-“

She circles the fourth floor balcony that Jon has drafted, “ _That_  cantilever isn’t safe. In no way is that passing any building codes. On any planet.”

“S’that so?” Jon asks, leaning down to look at her amendments, “Well, where would you suggest I put that balcony instead?”

“Anywhere but there, honestly,” Ygritte says, moving on to another set of drawings and taking her pen to them, “Let me know when you figure out where to put it.”

She raises an eyebrow at him in challenge and Jon lets out a bark of laughter, uncaps his pen.

“Alright, but maybe you should let me do the drawing, if we’re planning on handing these drawings in. Because yours are…” he makes a show of looking over her set of drawings, “ _Very_  engineering student.”

“I have no idea what you’re saying, Jon Snow,” she says, but she’s smiling, and it only widens as she meets his eye, “And  _apparently_  neither do you. Bloody architects, everything’s always up in the air with you.”

When the competition is over and their proposal submitted, Ygritte hovers by Jon as he rolls up his sketches, packs all his pens back into his case. He tries to make small talk and she complies for a few moments, where everything she says is an impressive double entendre, until suddenly she looks at her watch and clears her throat.

“So can I get your number, Jon Snow?” she asks, and Jon winces, because he thinks  _yes, god, under any other circumstances, yes_ , but when he opens his mouth, the wrong words tumble out instead.

“I’m not… I’m not in a good place to be- seeing anyone- er, at the moment.”

Ygritte frowns.

“Ah,” she says, thoughtfully, “Mysterious. Okay. I’ll not pressure you. But- how’s about I give you mine, and when you’re ready you call me, yeah?”

“That sounds good,” Jon says truthfully, and she raises an eyebrow.

“You don’t _have_ to say that.”

But she’s already scrawling her number on a scrap of paper, and Jon smiles.

“I mean it.”

“Good,” Ygritte grins, “So when you’re ready, call me, alright? And we’ll see if we can make that  _good_  place any better.”

“Definitely,” Jon laughs, and she winks at him before turning to walk away with her grin still in place. He looks down at the paper in his hand and tucks it carefully into his wallet, and if the walk to his flat seems shorter, he’s not giving himself three guesses why. 

 


End file.
